Another Great Week for the Books!

This week we have finished up group two in our Jolly Phonics, C/K, E, H, R, M and D. The students should be able to do the sounds and actions for each letter.

Popcorn words looked great this week! Lots of students were done before Friday! Way to go Grade 1's! A fun thing to do may be to watch out for your popcorn words on signs or in books you might read!

For Red Day we read our read poems and did our red words! As an art project we read Ten Apples Up on Top and did craftivity to go with it! Each student had an image of their face and chose how many apples they had on top! After they counted they wrote their number in their sentence. They're so adorable!

We also have been talking about how we read a book. As a class we have read two stories this week, I Spy and Apples. When we read we talk about looking at the pictures to think about what the story might be about, through a picture walk. This way when we read it might help us with some tricky words. Using the pictures to help us read is a great strategy for figuring out those tricky new words.

In Math we have become experts on counting to 10 and above! We're all working on being super stars counting to 20. This week we made our own 20 charts that we will use for math all year! Everyone had to cut their pieces and order them to 20 themselves! A lot of the kids did great!

In Science this week we continued talking about colours and their different shades. In a couple experiments we compared colours by lightness, darkness, or what colour they are more like (i.e. which flower is more blue?).
We did a fun experiment on Monday with water bottles and food colouring to see what happens when we add more colour? Does it get lighter or darker? Everyone was an awesome scientist and remembered that SAFETY is #1!

Later in the week we compared paint samples and sorted them by their lightness and darkness. I think every student aced this activity!

Thank you for those of you who made play dough! We will be mixing it up next week! If you have not sent in an oversized (and old) shirt for your child please do! I will be bringing some extras from home as well.

This week has been colourful!

We had our first "Book Check Out" Library class. Thanks Mrs. Hicks for your wonderful reading! This year Grade 1's are allowed to take out TWO books! Everyone was so excited. Our classroom rule is to try to keep one book at school and one can go home. This is so they have a book at their level to read during downtime in the classroom, as well as, always be able to return one book a week. Library books can be the best components in hide and seek at home!

In Language Arts we are continuing to practice our Jolly Phonics Letter sounds. We have completed our first group: s, a, t, i , p, and n. It would be extra helpful for your child to practice their letter sounds at home to help when we start writing our own words and sentences. They should know the motions of the Snake (s), Ants (a), Tennis Game (t), Inky Mouse (i), Puff (p) and Nnnnn Airplane.

The students have been doing some shared reading and word writing. On Tuesday they had some free time to practice reading their work with a partner.

In Math we have talked about adding and subtracting numbers. We know that when we add we're putting numbers together and when we subtract we are taking away from a number.
Using hoola hoops we acted out some math problems for the class to have a physical showing of addition and subtraction problems.

Thursday was BLUE DAY! We read a poem about the colour Blue, found the word blue in our poem and drew pictures and wrote words of things in our world that are blue!

As a craft we made Blue Bow Ties! They're so adorable!!!

In Science we have started talking about the colours in our world. We went on a colour walk all around inside and outside our school and talked about where we see colours. Together we wrote out some colour sentences from our walk.
As a mix of Math and Science, we made a graph of all our favourite colours. Like a book, graph's have titles that tell us about the information on the graph. It was pretty obvious what our most loved colour was!

Have a lovely weekend!

Settling in!

This week went so well! We're all getting settled into our usual routines and each day we're getting faster with our transitions!

New this week is our Classroom Dojo this is a classroom management tool that parents can keep tabs on their child's progress during the day too! Sent home on Thursday (or Wednesday if you were at Meet the Teacher) were your parent log in's to join the site and follow Miss Potter's Superstars!
If you need another copy of your log in information please let me know!

In Language Arts this week we have been working on our Popcorn Words homework and Phonics.

Popcorn Words are those silly sight words that might break some spelling rules, so we have to practice reading them until they POP out of our mouths! Every Monday a set of 5 words will be sent home and can be return by Friday (Monday the latest) for a homework star on their charts!

Phonics this week we are reviewing our Jolly Phonics Alphabet! So far we have covered, S, A, T, I and Monday will do P! This is our first group! We have thought things in our world that start with these letters and practiced writing these words out. You might see some phonics pages come home, those are to keep you updated with what were doing and are not homework. The only homework ever sent home (unless there is special circumstances) will be in the red Popcorn Words Duotang. 

In Math we have spent a lot of time practicing counting and representing numbers in different ways (up to 20). We have started working in our Number's Galore books, which show us how to tally, print our number words and simple addition sentences.
To start up this concept we played a Friend Finding Game - each student has a number shown in different ways (tallies, ten frames, etc). They had one minute to find partners with the same value. We then talked about number recipes, all the different ways to make numbers.

Next week we will start talking about addition and subtraction sentences.

In Social we are starting our All About Me unit. We will be having 1 Star Student each week, who will be sent home with a chart to fill out all about themselves. On the Friday of their week they will share their poster with the class.

In Science we have talked about seasons; Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall. We read a book that told us how the sun affects our season and changes the weather and the length of our days. As a review, ask you students what kinds of clothes they would wear in each season and what weather they would see.